Issue 80 • July/August 2023
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Building LEGO® Castles with builders Pantelis Manthos & Barthezz Brick
Custom Phineas & FerbTM minifigures! Building instructions & more!
Tour Guillaume Greuzard's Castle Metropolis
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Issue 80 • July 2023
Contents From the Editor....................................................2
People Udo King’s Mont-Saint-Michel..........................................3 Andrew Tereshchenko: Building Figures............................................10
Building Guillaume Greuzard: Castle Builder..................................................16 A Visual Tour of Guillaume Greuzard’s Castle Metropolis..........................................18 Barthezz Brick’s Assassin’s Creed: Venice 1486................24 BDD Builds Goes Medieval!.........................30 Pantelis Manthos’ Building in a Frame... And More!...............................34 All About Character!.......................................38 Minifigure Customization 101: “I Know What We’re Gonna Do Today!”........................................................44 BrickNerd Instructions: Harmony Castle.............................................53 You Can Build It: MINI Sea Serpent..........................................57
Community Down on His Luck: An Australian Painting Pop-up MOC................................62 Bantha Bricks: Pierre-Luc Belanger’s XJ-6 Airspeeder.............................................68 Community Ads...............................................78 Last Word.............................................................79 Classic AFOLs.....................................................80
July 2023 Issue 80
From the Editor: Hi!
Publisher John Morrow
This issue is themed toward castles, but not the castles you see in LEGO sets. These are builds made by fans inspired by the Castle sets of past and present.
Editor in Chief Joe Meno BrickNerd and Assistant Editor Dave Schefcik
You’ll also see castles of different scales, from the miniscale Mont-Saint Michel to minifgure scale castles. You’ll also see some castle-inspired figures.
Photography Editor Geoff Gray Proofreader John Morrow
Japanese Bureau Editor Nathan Bryan West Coast Editors Ashley Glennon
Bantha Bricks Correspondent Steven Smyth
Contributors: Pierre-Luc Belanger,Jared Burks, Christopher Deck, Bart Deliën, Brett Donaghue, Brian Everett, Jane Gibbons-Eyre, Guillaume Greuzard, Udo King, Pantelis Manthes, Liam Mohajeri Norris, David Strenzler, Andrew Tereshchenko, and Greg Hyland. Many thanks to the websites who have served as mirrors for BrickJournal: www.LUGNET.com, www.Brickshelf.com, www.peeron.com, www.brickmodder.net www.rustyclank.com
About the Cover: Guillaume’s Greuzard Castle Metropolis proudly stands at his home. Photo by Guillaume Greuzard.
About the Contents: Another view of Bart Deliën’s Assassin’s Creed layout. Photo by Bart Deliën.
The BrickNerd gang has created a castle that you can build, and Chris Ddeck built a ship for building... and there’s more... ...so sit back and take a look! Joe Meno P.S. Have ideas or comments? Drop me a line at brickjournal@gmail.com. I’m open to suggestions and comments and will do my best to reply. P.P.S... Yes, BrickJournal has a website—www.brickjournal.com! Twitter? Yep, there too—http://twitter.com/brickjournal. Facebook? Yup—http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=58728699914&ref=mf. Or you can scan the bottom codes with a QR reader!
Website
Glossary AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) AFFOL (Adult Female Fan of LEGO) TFFOL (Teen Female Fan of LEGO) NLSO (Non-LEGO Significant Other) MOC (My Own Creation) TLG (The LEGO Group) BURP (Big Ugly Rock Piece) LURP (Little Ugly Rock Piece) POOP (Pieces—that can be or should be made—Of Other Pieces)
Subscriptions
SNOT (Studs Not on Top) LUG (LEGO Users Group) LTC (LEGO Train Club) MECHA (a large armored robot on legs, typically controlled by a pilot seated inside) MECH (a large piloted combat robot) DARK AGES (usually teen years, when you drift away from building) STUDS OUT (building where the studs on bricks face the viewer)
BrickJournalTM issue 80, July/August 2023 (ISSN 1941-2347) is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Periodicals postage paid at Raleigh, NC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to BrickJournal, c/o TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Joe Meno, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. BrickJournal Editorial Offices: 6701 Coachman Drive, Springfield, VA 22152, USA. E-mail: admin@brickjournal.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Six-issue subscriptions: $73 US, $111 Elsewhere, $29 Digital Only, and can be purchased at www.twomorrows.com. LEGO ®, TECHNIC, MINDSTORMS, Belville, Scala, BIONICLE, ExoForce, Mars Mission, World City, and other LEGO theme lines are trademarks of the LEGO Group of companies. Star Wars TM & © Lucasfilm. All articles, photos, and art © BrickJournal Media, LLC, TwoMorrows Publishing and the respective writers, photographers, and artists. All rights reserved. All trademarked items are the property of their respective owners and licensees. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.
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BrickJournal and its staff would like to thank the LDraw community for the software it makes available to the community, which we use for making all of the instructions and renderings in this magazine. We would especially like to thank Kevin Clague for his continued upgrades of the LPub tool that is a part of the LDraw suite. For more information, please visit http://www.ldraw.org.
Located off the French coast, Mont-St-Michel is a tidal island that was built up as a commune. Only a few hundred meters from the mainland, the site was accessible to pilgrims during low tide, but also defensible, as the high tide would protect the island from invaders. Mont-Saint-Michel and its surrounding bay were inscribed on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1979 for its unique aesthetic and importance as a medieval Christian site. Over three million people visit it annually. Builder Udo King created this model of the site, which has a footprint of 96 studs (two large baseplates) by 96 studs, and stands at about 40 bricks high (15 inches or 38 centimeters). In terms of time, this was about 70 hours of building and uses over 20,000 LEGO elements. Photos were used for building reference, and what’s unusual about the model is that the building technique is traditional. There is very little sideways (or SNOT) building—walls are angled with wedge bricks and plates.
People
Udo King’s
Mont-SaintMichel Article and Photography by Udo King
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People
One of Andrew’s creations, a scribe from the videogame Stronghold.
Andrew Tereshchenko:
Building Figures Article and Photography by Dan Rubin Andrew Tereshchenko.
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Andrew Tereshchenko has been building for the past nine years, and in that time has made impressive sculptures that look more like detailed action figures. Back then he collected sets off the shelf. He got tired of collecting, and the last sets he collected were from the 2000s: Knights Kingdom II, Vikings, and Spongebob Squarepants. Andrew started building his own models like other AFOLs—he got impressed by some image/character, or found some piece is similar to X in object Y, which would lead him to building object Y. Building is absolutely unpredictable for Andrew. Completing a model is a process that can take a couple of days, maybe even a month. For a few projects, it can take six months, a year, or more. Andrew isn’t in a hurry to build—today, he may be thinking of what pieces can be applied to a face, for example; and tomorrow he will be able to connect two or three
Can you find this part in Lothar’s face?
Lothar from the game Gothic II.
Lothar’s interior structure.
of them. The day after tomorrow, he may realize that nothing will work, and the next week he will finally connect more. After that, he’ll assemble the nose, then find that it won’t connect to the rest of the model design, and put the model aside until he comes up with a new look and solutions to continue. For unusual applications of parts, Andrew mentions three of his models:
Can you find these parts on Aun’Va’s face?
1. Lothar from Gothic II: using the Shoretrooper helmet from Rogue One as the bottom half the face. 2. Aun’Va from Warhammer 40k: the forehead is built from the Sweet Mayhem Happy Meal toy that was released for the LEGO Movie 2. The nose comes from Jayko’s torso from Knight’s Kingdom 2. Aun’Va.
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Building
The Castle Metropolis.
A Visual Tour of Guillaume Greuzard’s
Castle Metropolis
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Guillaume Greuzard’s Castle Metropolis is an excellent example of not only building a set of buildings, but also building an environment. The display comes to life thanks to attention to detail, sideways building, and accents of color. Let’s take a close look at the display!
Laying the Land The entire display is built on a base of plates and bricks that raises everything off from the display level. The built base serves to separate the build from the table and creates a ‘stage’ for everything. A closer examination of the edges shows that the ground of the display is studsup, but the edges are built with studs to the sides. This is done by building the ground level five plates high. Five plates height equals a length of two studs, so the level is two studs high. Using bricks that have studs on the side at the top allows a perfect fit for the sideways bricks. You can see how this works in the close-up. The round plates on the right edge allow for the slope bricks to be added studs-up and merge with the ground level. The slopes in the center and left are sideways and attached by hidden bricks with side studs under the dark green round plate. The sideways bricks are not evenly placed, creating a shadow that creates an outline.
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Building
Barthezz Bricks’
Assassin’s Creed: Venice 1486
Article and Photography by Bart Deliën Bart’s layout of Venice, from the game Assassin’s Creed. One of the ships built for the diorama.
Barthezz Bricks is a page on Facebook (and gallery in Flickr) that centers on Castle building. The person behind the creations is Bart Deliën, a 37-year old dad from the Netherlands. During the day, he works as a Senior Content Manager at bol.com, an online e-tailer. Bart returned to building in 2017 after a Dark Age of twenty years. Bart’s initial trigger back to the hobby started in 2016 when his parents wanted to move to a smaller house. They wanted to get rid of all of his LEGO, so they asked him what he wanted to do with it. He took in the collection and spent the next year sorting and rebuilding his sets from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Discovering that his sets were missing a lot of parts, Bart found Bricklink.com and joined the LEGO community. When he saw the builds from Mark of Falworth (a Castle build) and Aliencat (a Dutch builder that made a fantastic city management build), that got him thinking: “That’s what I want to do as well.” The rest is history.
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Bart’s favorite theme is historical, definitely including the
Castle era. Looking at his galleries and builds, one can see his affinity for history.
A gondola made for the layout.
His builds are 90% his own imagination and fantasy. Bart very rarely searches for inspiration in existing things. He likes to imagine how it would look, or looked, back in its day. For his Venice diorama, he completely made up how it would have looked at that time. For his diorama of Lond Daer, he only had four lines of text from Wikipedia when he was asked to join a building collaboration. To build the diorama, he had to develop an architectural style and layout for the human race of Gondor that would blend in with the Lord of the Rings movies, as they are the main reference points for people. Most of Bart’s builds take 300 to 400 hours within a fivemonth timeframe to complete—a typical layout is about three 48-stud by 48-stud baseplates. This includes the design and development phase, building, and taking photos.
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Building
All About Character! Article and Photography by Liam Mohajeri Norris @brixter.productions
Ms. Marvel.
Building brick-built characters with LEGO has been a passion of mine for nearly a decade. I love the challenge of creating a well-known pop culture icon out of LEGO. If something in the build is off, it can ruin the entire model. When everything is just right, on the other hand, the recognition is instant. Figuring out how to build a character that hits this sweet spot is tricky, but so satisfying when done right. I have been iterating my character-building method for years, always trying to incorporate more playability and strength at a relatively compact scale. Po from Kung Fu Panda.
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The evolution that has led to my current style started over six years ago, back in 2016. I had recently turned 13, and was finally able to submit my first LEGO IDEAS project: a brick-built Po from Kung Fu Panda. This build was quite different from the characters that would follow, but it does carry one important similarity to my later models: the scale. Most of my character builds have been of a similar action figure stature, slightly larger than Miniland scale but still workable and, importantly, playable. Unlike all the builds that would follow, this Po was not poseable. However, within a year I was working on a follow-up project featuring Tintin that shares many more similarities with my recent work.
Tintin and Captain Haddock.
Building Tintin and Captain Haddock was my first attempt at creating poseable humanoid figures based on existing characters. Since these were built digitally, I had no way of knowing whether or not they would actually stand up, but I did my best to make them physically feasible. With the unlimited color palette of LEGO Digital Designer, I did not have to worry about parts such as Mixel ball joints only existing in certain colors, a challenge that has led to many of my later innovations. I never finished submitting this project; it still waits in my “Drafts” tab on LEGO IDEAS. Notwithstanding, these figures were an important step toward my later characters. In 2017, I saw the trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW) for the first time. I was captivated by its incredible vistas and sense of exploration. After seeing BotW gameplay live at a friend’s house, I knew I had to build a LEGO version of its protagonist, Link. I was in the middle of an overseas move with my family and had no access to my LEGO collection, so I turned to LDD once again. The resulting build had a number of issues with proportions, not to mention the lack of a head.
My first attempt at Link.
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Building
Minifigure Customization 101:
Phineas and Ferb, Perry TM & © Disney.
“ I Know What We’re Gonna Do Today!”
There’s 60ish Days Between Every Issue...
Article and Photography by Jared Burks
I Know What We’re Gonna do Today!
Reference art.
Caitlin, my daughter asked, “Whatcha doin?” to which I replied, “We’re making Phineas and Ferb Custom LEGO figures.” My wife inquired, “Aren’t you a little old to be doing that?” and I answered, “Yes, yes I am.” Greyson, my son, joined in by asking, “Hey Dad, where’s Perry?” I told Greyson, “He’s just a platypus; they don’t do much.” Greyson replied, “Platypuses are the only mammals to lay eggs.” Ultimately I decided to “Seize the day”—well, couple of weeks—I am not Phineas after all, but “I like to keep moving forward.” B-b-b-but making the figures took a touch longer because I searched the entire Tri-State area and just really couldn’t find Perry the Platypus. Great Googly-Moogly, I couldn’t merely make Phineas and Ferb. I of course had to include Perry the Platypus. However, I quickly realized I had to make Agent P, to which my children replied, “That’s so cool.”
Backstory—I think it’s Best Expressed in a Song! Oh wait, this isn’t an audio format. In retrospect, here are the details of my monologue describing my evil plan: I started out sculpting the heads using Fusion 360, as I still have not had enough time to work with Blender. I initially thought I would merely sculpt everything and print it out and paint all the various parts of these figures. While I started this way, I quickly paused after a few initial prints when I realized just how hard it was going to be to paint various areas of these figures. The eyes, for example, would be quite challenging.
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Head turnarounds of Phineas and Ferb.
Reflecting on what I was going to do, which seems like a recipe for evil, I decided to print each part of each figure separately so that I could use colored resin as a base. This way, if the paint is damaged through play, it would blend and hide the damage.
Well, if we are going to make the best Custom Figures Ever, better get started. I quickly asked, “What am I looking at?” when it hit me that P&F are always in two dimensions —well, there is that one film, but I digress. I had to search the entire TriState area for multiple images from the show, and even look for the very rare moments where the characters turn around in the show.
I was really feeling for Candace during this time of the build. Not only did I have to figure out how to make a kid with an arrowhead attach to a LEGO torso, but I had to build a LEGO animal that has roughly the same proportions in two very different forms.
BEHOLD! THE PHIN-ERB-INATOR! Phineas
• Hair – Custom Designe d and P rinted • Head – Custom Designe d and P r • Eyes – Custom inted Designe d and P rinted • Shirt collar – Custom Designe d and P rinted • Torso Design v ia Masking - Paintin g
Platypus Printed Perry t–hCeustom Designed nanddPrinted ned a • Body d m Desig to s u C nd Printe – • Tail signed a e D m to Cus • Bill –
Ferb
om Designed • Hair – Cust and Printed ed stom Design • Head – Cu and Printed ed stom Design • Eyes – Cu and Printed r – Custom • Shirt Colla d Printed Designed an gn via Maskin • Torso Desig Painting
Agent P
• Hat – Modified LEGO Hat and Printed • Torso – Custo m Designed and Printed • Arms – Modifi ed LEGO Arm and Printed • Feet – Custom Designed and Printed • Bill – Custom Designed and Printed • Tail – Custom Designed and Printed
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Community
Down on His Luck by Jane Gibbons-Eyre.
Down On His Luck:
There is no doubt that Instagram has gained in popularity in recent years (especially during Covid) with the AFOL community. That community has grown to be quite massive really, and it hosts a variety of builders, set collectors, and smaller communities for one to follow.
Article by Brian Everett of BrickNerd.com Photography by Jane Gibbons-Eyre
I enjoy chatting with like-minded AFOLs and discovering new creations that I was not aware of when they are often shared by others, which is the reason I continue to spend so much time on the platform (way too much!).
An Australian Painting Pop-Up MOC
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Creative works being shared by others is exactly how I became aware of Jane Gibbons-Eyre. At the time, Bricktober 2022 was running and I was enjoying the highlight of many MOCs coming from that show. And then I spotted Down On His Luck, a MOC that looked like a painting that has popped off the canvas.
“Down on His Luck” by Australian Artist Fredrick McCubbin. Image via Wikipedia.
Today, I am delighted to share a feature on Jane’s wonderful build, and a quick chat with her to go along with it! Brian Everett: First, thank you very much for providing so many wonderful photos! I have to say, your MOC immediately caught my eye when I saw it, and it was quickly shared with the BrickNerd family. I see this was directly inspired by a real painting, which to me is already interesting, coming from an art background. What specifically gave you the inspiration to recreate this painting? Jane Gibbons-Eyre: Many, many years ago as a teen, I visited the Golden Summers art exhibition at my state art gallery. This showcased paintings by historic Australian artists, including Frederick McCubbin. These paintings left a strong impression on me, and have influenced many
A overhead look at the subject of the painting.
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